Blues In The Digital Age

MySpace announced the launch of a global events and calendar platform providing users with new tools to create, discover, share, and manage events across MySpace and multiple social networks. Designed to benefit users and artists alike, MySpace Events organizes a deep catalog of pop culture events and recommends all types including concerts, sports, nightlife, and the arts and easily enables users to purchase tickets to their favorite events.

“Our users already post millions of events to MySpace each year and the events platform is the next step in enabling them to discover, create, and socialize around the events that are most relevant to them,” said Jason Hirschhorn, co-president of MySpace. “MySpace Events allows users to find events of every size from a local concert to the next Lakers game to Jay-Z’s tour and then takes it a step further by providing the option to easily share the event and even purchase tickets.”

Ability to buy concert tickets directly from an artist’s profile via 3rd parties
MySpace Music is one of the highest-trafficked music websites and the artist profiles will soon be updated to offer advanced features and ticket-purchase functionality. This provides MySpace a new revenue opportunity and supports our goal of being a top destination where people discover music and concerts. MySpace already has nearly one million concerts in the 2010 events calendar.

A new type of social advertising
Advertisers who want to promote an event (a concert, a TV premiere, a DVD release, etc) can now purchase a new special ad format that displays sponsored events directly inside the social calendar. When a user RSVPs “yes”, they then also promote the sponsored event to their friends.

One view of your events across MySpace and the web
All your events show up inside your MySpace calendar, including your Facebook events (via Social Plan’s previous Facebook Connect implementation). We’re providing features to share events on MySpace via the Stream and across the web including on Facebook, Twitter, and tiny url.

In addition to benefiting MySpace users, MySpace Events offers established and emerging artists and comedians viral self-promotion tools to quickly and easily create events, reaching fans through a geographically targeted browse experience and richer event detail pages. MySpace has the largest database of concerts, events, and performances, by artists and performers of all types, and now through the new events platform MySpace is surfacing and promoting this database in a more prominent and easy-to-use calendar.

“Ultimately our goal is to create a destination that allows users to manage their entire social calendar online through MySpace,” said Marcus Womack, Director of Events and Ticketing for MySpace. “Also, we’re providing artists with advanced tools to help connect with fans and promote their shows while conversely enabling fans to quickly and easily discover, share and purchase tickets to those shows.”

MySpace Events platform leverages technology from iLike and Social Plan demonstrating the benefits of these acquisitions for MySpace users, artists and advertisers. Currently, the iLike local concert app is the most popular concert app on the iPhone. In March 2010, nearly 126 million event invites were sent with the Social Plan app on MySpace.